Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2)

by Susan McBride

  She swallowed hard. “What’s her name?”

  Before she answered, Ramsey checked the small notepad she’d pulled from her breast pocket. Jo appreciated that she wanted to get it right.

  “Kelly Amster,” she said. “She’s fifteen, just started her sophomore year at Plainfield High three weeks ago. Her mom got scared when she went into her daughter’s room and found a note left on the pillow. Then she tried to call the girl’s cell phone but got no answer.”

  “What’d the note say?” Jo asked.

  Ramsey cleared her throat, then read straight from the notebook: “‘I love you, but it hurts too much to stay. I’m sorry. So, so sorry.’”

  Jo let out a slow breath. “Well, damn.”

  “So we’ve got a legit suicide note?” Hank said, his gaze on the girl. The frustration had left his face, and instead he looked gray.

  “Seems that way,” Ramsey said.

  “So it wasn’t an accident? No one pushed her? She decided to end it all, just like that?” Hank asked, not giving the patrol officer room to answer between his questions. “I’m surprised no one live-streamed it on any of those bloodsucking social media sites,” he added bitterly.

  Jo tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it wouldn’t go away.

  “Barbara Amster stated that she called her daughter last night to check on her. The girl answered her phone,” Ramsey informed them as she tucked away her notepad. “Said she sounded off, like something wasn’t right. But her guess was that Kelly was upset that she didn’t make it home for dinner.”

  “She sounded off, huh? Like something wasn’t right,” Hank murmured, and he stomped down a cluster of dandelions with a boot heel.

  “Did you find her phone?” Jo asked. That could answer a lot of questions. Kids these days lived and died by their cell phones. Their whole lives were wrapped up in a SIM card: texts, e-mails, search history, apps, call history, everything and everyone they loved or hated. If Kelly Amster had wanted to kill herself, she’d probably told somebody or made a video journal about it.

  “We haven’t found it yet, no. It wasn’t on her, but we’re looking. We’ve collected a few pieces of plastic that look like cell phone parts. We bagged them, of course, but they could be somebody else’s trash. There’s plenty of that around here. Got to watch out for broken glass.”

  “What time did Barbara Amster talk to her daughter?”

  “Approximately nine thirty p.m.”

  “You think the girl tossed her phone from the top?” Hank tipped his head back to stare at the tower. “Or left it up there?”

  “We’ll know soon enough. Duncan’s climbing the ladder,” Ramsey said. “If there’s anything there, he’ll bag it and bring it down.”

  “Better him than me and my bad knees.” Hank shifted on his feet, his gaze returning to the dead girl. “She had balls, didn’t she? Getting up there’s a long haul. Gave her plenty of time to change her mind. Why the hell didn’t she change her mind?” He expelled a noisy breath. “Poor, poor kid.”

  “Kelly,” Jo found herself saying. The girl’s name was Kelly.

  She should have been on her way to her first-period class, learning Spanish or algebra or whatever it was that fifteen-year-old sophomores studied these days. She should have been complaining about the cafeteria food, deciding whether she wanted to try out for the fall musical, dishing on the latest boy band, and forgetting the combination to her locker.

  Not waiting for the van to take her to the county morgue.

  Jo ignored the stitch in her chest, instead looking for something that would explain how someone so young had ended up in the shadow of the old water tower, broken beyond repair.

  Her clothing looked ordinary, like every other teenager Jo saw these days: white cutoff shorts and a graphic T-shirt, this one purple with an emoji face sticking out its tongue. She had well-worn pink Vans on her feet, no socks.

  Her blue eyes were wide open, brown hair splayed around a pale, freckled face. There was some blood at her mouth and nose, but otherwise nothing. The worst of the damage was beneath the skin: broken bones, a cracked spine, crushed organs. Like Hank had said, you didn’t jump 130 feet figuring you’d walk away.

  “Makes me want to kick someone’s ass,” her partner murmured.

  Jo did, too. But she wasn’t sure whose.

  “Is there a father in the picture?” she wondered aloud.

  “No,” Ramsey said. “The parents divorced long ago. He remarried and doesn’t live around here. Houston, I think she said. According to the mother, he hasn’t seen his daughter in about five years.”

  “I’d die if I couldn’t see my girls,” Hank admitted. “It would tear me up inside.”

  “Your girls are lucky,” Jo told him. Not every kid was. For some, childhood was more a matter of treading water, keeping your head up so you could breathe. That was how Jo saw it, anyway, and not just because of what she’d witnessed on the job too many times through the years. That was how she’d lived it.

  Had it been the same for Kelly Amster?

  She squatted down beside the body, pushing away grass so tall, it had gone to seed. She wondered when it had last been mowed, or if the town even cared. The old water tower was more like a grave marker, a sad memento of the past. Soon it would be gone altogether, and no one would remember who had climbed its heights on a dare, who had partied there or broken up there or died there.

  Ramsey’s shoulder walkie started to squawk, and she excused herself, walking away as she picked up.

  Between the stalks of green, Jo could see the girl’s hand: pale and slim, no rings, a thin bracelet around her wrist made of colored string. A friendship bracelet? So maybe she had a buddy she’d talked to, someone who’d be able to help explain this.

  Jo leaned nearer, getting a good look at her face.

  A freckled nose. Gold studs in pierced ears. Pale eyes that stared at nothing, sightless.

  Ramsey stopped talking on her walkie and came back.

  “Duncan said there are only bits and pieces of plastic, but no intact cell phone. Also, a couple of empty cans of spray paint and nasty old beer cans,” Ramsey said. “But we’ll keep looking.”

  “Got an address for the mom?” Hank asked, pulling out his cell phone. “Give me her number, too.”

  Ramsey rattled off what he needed, repeating things a couple of times as Hank did his best hunt-and-peck to input the information. Then he squatted as low as he could on his infamous bum knees to take a few photos of the girl’s face and her clothing.

  “Should we close her eyes first?” Jo asked. He meant to show the pics to the mother, she knew, to confirm that it was Kelly. Would she want to see her daughter’s death stare, glassy as marbles?

  “Does it really matter?” he said, shrugging, before he put his phone away.

  “I guess it doesn’t,” Jo replied. Because dead was dead, right? A mother’s heart would be broken irreparably regardless.

  “Let’s go, Larsen,” he said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Jo rose from the grass, brushing hands on her jeans. She’d seen enough, too.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The street where Kelly Amster had lived with her mother was within walking distance of the water tower. It sat in an older section of Plainfield, and not the kind with tall shade trees and ample acreage like Amanda Pearson’s. The lots were compact, and the size of the houses more akin to bungalows than sprawling ranches. Between well-tended yards with plotted flower beds and trimmed boxwoods were neglected abodes with shin-high lawns and filthy Big Wheels getting strangled by weeds.

  Nearby, strip malls abounded, and train tracks ran beyond a patchwork of fencing. Jo could hear the whistle and the rhythmic clickety-clack as Hank parked the Ford and they got out.

  “Being near train tracks lowers the value of your house by something like twelve percent,” Hank remarked, a factoid he had probably picked up from a late-night HGTV binge. “It’s about the same as being near a highway.”

 
; Jo looked at the house that had been Kelly Amster’s home, and she doubted the girl had worried much about resale.

  The place reminded her of where she’d grown up on Lemmon Avenue in the city. Had Kelly lain in bed at night, too, listening to the noise of passing trains, unable to sleep?

  As a kid, Jo had done that often, although what she’d heard had been the sound of jet engines, taking off from Love Field and flying people to faraway places. How many times had she wished she were a passenger? Too many to count. She wondered if Kelly Amster had wished she’d been on one of the trains that scuttled by on the tracks, getting the hell away from whatever demons had been plaguing her in Plainfield.

  Something must have kept her up at night. Something bad enough to make her decide to climb the tower and throw herself over the railing.

  “I hate this,” Hank grumbled as they walked up the path to the front door. “No, I take that back. Hate isn’t a strong enough word.”

  “Yep.” Jo figured that pretty much said it all.

  The door opened, and a slender woman stood on the threshold, waiting.

  Jo’s first impression of her was the color gray: gray sweats, gray T-shirt, faded gray in her dark brown hair, deep gray circles beneath eyes the very same washed-out blue as her daughter’s. There was a grayness surrounding her, too. If Jo had been more New Age, she would have called it an aura. It wasn’t even that the woman appeared devastated or broken, more like she’d given up.

  “Barbara Amster?” she asked, earning a quick bob of the head. “I’m Detective Larsen, and this is my partner, Detective Phelps.”

  “You’re here about Kelly,” she said, the words emerging in a slow drawl. She sounded sleepy, and her eyes seemed foggy, unable to fully focus.

  It reminded Jo a little of how Mama had been in the mornings, waking up with a hangover. Did Kelly’s mom drink or take sleeping pills?

  The bleary eyes shifted from Jo to Hank. “The policewoman I talked to, she said Kelly’s dead. Is it true?”

  “If you’re up to it, ma’am, we’ve got some photos of the deceased. Would you mind taking a look so you can positively identify her?” Hank said.

  He waited for Mrs. Amster’s nod before he drew his phone from his pocket. Then he pulled up the photos he’d taken of the girl’s face and her clothing. Slowly, he scrolled through them, giving her enough time in between to digest each image.

  “Is this your daughter, ma’am? Is this Kelly?”

  Jo was expecting tears to come in a flood, but they didn’t. She began to wonder if they’d made a mistake until Mrs. Amster let out a soft sigh.

  “Yes, that’s her,” she said, and her shoulders slumped. She seemed accepting, not angry, like she was no stranger to tragedy. Or maybe she was just so used to dealing with sick people and death that she’d grown a callus over her emotions. “I can’t believe she actually went through with it.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Hank said, clearly perplexed. “Had she tried before? To take her life, I mean.”

  “Tried to take her life before?” the woman repeated, then seemed to understand the implication of her remark. “Oh, no, Detective, it’s nothing like that. It’s just . . . kids like to talk big to make you feel guilty. Sometimes when Kelly got mad at me, she’d say hurtful things. But it was only words until now.”

  So Kelly Amster had threatened to kill herself before? Is that what her mother was implying?

  Jo started to open her mouth, to ask the woman why she hadn’t paid attention to those words, but Hank stepped in.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Amster,” he said, sounding far more conciliatory than Jo felt. “We’re just starting to put together the pieces. If you can help us fill in any gaps, we’d appreciate it. We’d like to be sure we’re not making assumptions.”

  “I’ll try,” the woman said and hugged herself. She shivered and, with a shake of her shoulders, seemed to shrug off her gray mantle and come to life. Her hand went up to her mouth, and she moaned through her fingers. “I can’t believe my baby girl has left me. She’s really gone?”

  “I know this is hard,” Jo said and resisted the urge to physically reach out, to pat her arm or her shoulder. “But can we talk to you about Kelly? We’d like to try to understand what happened.”

  The woman removed her hand from her mouth, lowering it to between her breasts, where she left it, a fist against her heart. “The officer I spoke with . . . she said Kelly was found below the old water tower. I think she was there when I called her last night. Was I the last person to hear her voice? Do you think it was something I said?”

  “Can we come in?” Jo asked. “It might be easier . . .”

  “Yes, of course.” Mrs. Amster drew in a breath, as if summoning up the energy to open the door wider. “This way,” she finally said and gestured inside.

  As there was nothing as fancy as a foyer to pass through, they walked right into a living area with sofa and chairs set within viewing distance of a wall-hung TV. The lights were off, and in the dimness of the room, the black screen looked a bit like a window to nowhere.

  Jo located the wall switch and flicked it on.

  “Oh, that’s so bright.” Mrs. Amster groaned, shading her eyes as she plunked down on the sofa. “I wish I’d never gotten up.” She pulled the cuffs of her sweatshirt over her fists, tucking them beneath her chin. “I wish I was still sleeping. Maybe I am.”

  “Would you rather have the lights off?” Jo couldn’t find a dimmer.

  “I don’t know what I want,” the woman said flatly and closed her eyes for a long moment. She winced as she opened them again. “I can’t believe this is real. We were together yesterday morning. We both slept in. Kelly made pancakes. She knew I was having a rough time with one of my cases.”

  “Was that when you last saw her?” Hank asked, as he took a seat in a chair across a coffee table strewn with candy bar wrappers and fashion magazines.

  Jo didn’t even try to sit. She knew she couldn’t stay still.

  Mrs. Amster didn’t appear to notice Jo moving about. Her eyes were on Hank.

  “I guess it was. I left for work about eleven. I spent the day getting a baby with stage-four cancer transferred out of the hospital so he could die at home. Breaks my heart. It truly does.”

  “You’re a nurse, right?” Hank repeated what Charlotte Ramsey had told them.

  “I do mostly chronic care cases for At-Home Angels. My schedule’s kind of erratic because of that. When a client’s end-stage, they need me more often.”

  “Do you set your own hours?”

  “I go where I’m needed, and I don’t worry about the hours,” Mrs. Amster explained. “Sometimes it’s not convenient for me as a mom, but illness is never convenient for anyone, is it? Kind of like crime, I suppose. But Kelly could take care of herself. She understood.”

  Jo looked around the small but tidy space at the school pictures of Kelly hung on the walls, chronicling each step through life from wide-eyed kindergartener to grade-school kid with missing teeth, awkward girl with braces in junior high, and then a brilliant metamorphosis into a very lovely, fresh-faced high school teen.

  Jo searched for something in the images—a sadness in the eyes, an emptiness that projected some kind of neglect—but there was nothing there. Kelly looked like a pretty content child.

  “So your daughter was used to not having you around?” Hank said, the blunt edge to the question causing Jo to turn.

  She expected Mrs. Amster to get defensive, but the woman didn’t even bristle.

  “Do I wish I didn’t have to work so much?” she remarked, eyes on Hank. “Yes, Detective. I do. But when you’re a single mom, you don’t have much of a choice. When Kelly was smaller, I took her to jobs when I could. As she got older, she did the latchkey thing, like so many kids do. But we had dinner together every night.” She glanced down, shifting position. “Well, most nights.”

  “But not last night?” Hank said.

  “No,” she answered quietly.

 
; Jo felt a familiar ache, understanding instinctively how Kelly must have felt, growing up and having so little of her mother. Kelly’s situation had been different from Jo’s, though. Her mom hadn’t neglected her for booze or men. She’d left her daughter in order to care for others. Had that been hard for a child to understand? And was that Barbara Amster’s fault? She had to work by necessity. Single moms didn’t have it easy, and no matter what politicians preached, it wasn’t simple to find support.

  Verna Larsen Kaufman had been a stay-at-home mom. She’d had no excuses for what she’d done—or hadn’t done—to save her child and had no one to blame but herself.

  Jo went back to the chairs across from the coffee table and sat down. “Had you noticed Kelly showing any signs of depression? Had she been acting different lately? Any changes in her behavior?”

  Mrs. Amster half smiled. “You’re not a mother, are you?”

  Jo felt stung by the remark. “No, ma’am, I’m not.”

  “She’s a teenager, Detective. Behaving strangely is what they do.”

  Why did that feel like a brush-off rather than a real answer?

  “Was she on medication for anything? Maybe for ADD? ADHD?” Jo tried.

  “No.”

  “Had she seen a therapist or psychiatrist in the past? What about after the divorce?”

  “After the divorce, we were both better off.” With a sigh, Mrs. Amster poked her missing hands from the sweatshirt sleeves to reach up, reworking her messy ponytail. “If Kelly had any serious mental issues, I would have told you already.”

  Jo turned to Hank, willing him to step in because she wasn’t getting anywhere with the woman.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m guessing since you work in the medical field that you’d know signs of depression in your own daughter,” he said, pursuing Jo’s line of questioning. “And, yes, I’m a parent. I have two girls. I worry about ’em every damned day.”

  Jo knew why he’d added that last part, and she wanted to kiss him. Barbara Amster couldn’t brush him off with a dismissive remark the way she had Jo.

  The woman fumbled with her reply at first. “Of course I would see . . . I mean, I’d like to think so, although I couldn’t begin to know what was going on inside her head every minute.” Then she shrugged off her discomfort and returned to deflecting. “Look, she was a teenage girl. There were always things that weren’t right—with other girls, with boys, with me. If she didn’t get invited to a party, she moped. If she did get invited, she’d still find something to be upset about. It drove me up a wall, but I don’t find that abnormal, do you?” She looked straight at Hank.